I don’t have a good read on the Hispanic vote, but there’s reason for Democrats to worry, as Thomas Edsall points out.
Just four and even two years ago, politicians gave a lot of attention to Latinos, driven in part by immigration and by Trump calling them “drug dealers, criminals and rapists.” But in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, Democrats apparently forgot all about Hispanics, or took them for granted, or casually lumped them with all “people of color,” or just assumed they were down with the imbecilic anti-police rhetoric.
Big mistake, that.
Latinos are seventeen percent of the population and thirteen percent of the electorate. Here in Texas, they are 39 percent of the population and thirty percent of the electorate, and they feel they’ve been given short shrift. More than a third say they’re ambivalent about even voting. Others have no truck with much of the patronizing rhetoric coming from the left:
Latinos “preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work,” write Ian Haney López, a UC Berkeley law professor and Tory Gavito, a human rights attorney.
I might add that obnoxiously telling Latinos that they should call themselves “Latinx” hasn’t helped, either.
According to a Pew Research study published in August, 93% say they never use the made-up, linguistically disconnected ethnic-studies term; three quarters have never even heard of it. But that hasn’t stopped woke whites from using it with great self-satisfaction, pissing off a demographic that liberals cannot afford, short term or long, to alienate.
Is there time to shore up the Latino vote? Maybe. But not if Democrats shine them on.